FanPulse

The core functionality of any product is something to be proud of, and
to build something that is awesome quickly that is also extremely high
quality requires a ton of supporting features.

In today's community of startups there is no shortage of products
available for almost every single supporting product most companies
require. And if something is lacking, that's a golden opportunity to
start something in.

FanPulse has been blessed with an amazing collection of services that
help us concentrate on our core feature by utilizing the services of
third parties, most notably Superfeedr (http://superfeedr.com).

Superfeedr was a mystery to us when we first started researching
techniques of pulling in news stories from thousands of blogs and
sport news sources. The concept was just so outstanding, that it went
against all the usual RSS feed fetching techniques that have been
etched into the process of basic aggregation of information across the
web. We just could not believe how easy this supporting feature could
possibly be for us.

Superfeedr is itself a startup, but Julien who runs Superfeedr has
excellent expertise on everything feed related. The beginnings of
FanPulse included Julien coming to our office to chat and talk us
through Superfeedr's services and even helped brainstorm the amount of
options and potential Superfeedr would help FanPulse thrive.

Shortly after our meeting, FanPulse's initial news feed was up and
running. We imported thousands of blogs and news sources to help
supply our breaking news for all our sport games. Running on Heroku
as a cloud instance forced us into a new frontier of backend processes
which are challenging without the traditional dedicated servers.
Superfeedr helped us hurdle over those challenges with room to spare.

No longer did we need to worry about building our own feed fetching
process, instead we just setup simple web hooks that Superfeedr would
use to push us new articles that we needed to know about. That's it!
All we had to do is build in the smarts of processing all the new
articles and serve them to our users based on check-in games and team
favorites.

With Superfeedr I saved hours of writing code to constantly pull news
feeds, figure out new articles vs. old articles, and any headaches
associated with maintaining that. We were able to concentrate on the
core features of running sport articles through natural language
processors and determining which users should know about what news.

The best part of Superfeedr is I haven't had to think about them ever
since. Apart from tweaking our own algorithms, Superfeedr just works!
Superfeedr is the ideal company you would want to work with in a
startup world.

We currently use them to push news articles to us while we process
everything, but in the future we will be using them to push more
complex features for better premium sports notification packages.

Julien and I will collaborate together on a simple publication of best
practices in setting up blog and news RSS feeds. Bloggers and any RSS
feed publishers will soon learn how to make their news optimal for
services like Superfeedr+FanPulse to utilize and promote articles
efficiently. Look out for that blog post in the near future!

Big thanks to Julien and the Superfeedr team!

http://superfeedr.com | http://twitter.com/superfeedr